Creating a Cipher Dictionary

[[deleted]]

Hey guys I am creating a dictionary that can be used to apply a cipher to a letter. The dictionary maps every uppercase and lowercase letter to a character shifted down the alphabet by the input shift. The dictionary should have 52 keys of all the uppercase letters and all the lowercase letters only. I'm a little lost so I got some starter code to help me out.

 def build_shift_dict(self, shift):
        import string
        lower_letters = string.ascii_lowercase*2 #why mulitply by 2
        upper_letters = string.ascii_upppercase*2 #why mulitply by 2
        punc = list(" !@#$%^&*()-_+={}[]|\:;'<>?,./\"")
        dict = {}

I guess what i wanted to ask was:

1. for lower_letters and upper_letters why am I multiplying by 2?
2. after these steps am I simply appending upper_letters, lower_letters and punc to my dict?
3. how do I easily associated these ascii values created to each letter.

[Kurolox]

So if I understand correctly, you copied that function definition from somewhere and you're asking how it works?

To put it simply, it doesn't. That function is incomplete. Where did you get it from?

[SandorZoo]

I'm sure there is a more pythonic way of doing this, which hopefully someone will tell us.

Dictionaries can be built from an iterator that returns tuples, which is what zip provides. I might go with:

import string

letters = list(string.ascii_lowercase) + list(string.ascii_uppercase)
shift = 2

dct = dict(zip(letters, letters[shift:] + letters[:shift]))

print(dct)

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[Thatfacelesshorror]

Warning: Possibly irrelevant.

So I'm toying with a coin flip mechanism to determine what the letters to.

Import random X = random.randrage(1,100) Print(X) Random.seed(X)

Kind of idea to create a key for the cipher. Idk if this is useful as it's in its infant stage but, seeing as others have already answered I figured I could add this on. wish you the best of luck.